State of the Union: Will Obama Tell Young People He's Screwing Them Big Time?

Probably not, but they should listen up anyway.

For at least the next 36 hours, the political media will be talking about President Barack Obama's State of the Union address (SOTU) as if it's a meaningful event. Will Obama go bold or timid into this good night, will he make the case for more taxes and fewer guns, for engaging North Korea or ignoring the Hermit Kingdom, for stuffing versus potatoes?—that sort of thing. As my colleague Matt Welch pointed out yesterday, SOTUs are equal parts WTF and completely forgettable, so it'll all be over soon except for the ardent declarations that we can make lifesaving machines more quickly in a zero-gravity environment.

But if the proprietor of the most open and transparent and clean-smelling administration of all time wants to make some real news, he might speak honestly to the segment of the American electorate that he is screwing over six ways to Sunday: Young voters between the ages of 18 and 29. Listen up, kids! Your parents are robbing your futures blind and you're chumps enough not only to go along but to say—like the adorable title orphan in the classic baby boomer musical Oliver!—please, sir, I want some more.

From virtually every possible angle, Obama is helping to diminish the prospects for today's younger generation. First and foremost, his response to the Great Recession—stimulus and the massive piling up of debt—is slowing the recovery. Ginormous regulatory schemes such as Dodd-Frank and the creation of huge new soul-and-bucks-sucking programs such as Obamacare weigh heavily on the economy now and in the future too. His refusal to discuss seriously old-age entitlement reform—Medicare and Social Security and the 40 percent of Medicaid that goes to old folks—is a massive storm front on the economic horizon. His preference for secrecy and overreach when it comes to executive power won't screw young people as obviously as his economic policies, but when he leaves office in 2017, he will have created far more terrorists than he needed to.

courtesy New York Times

Yet The New York Times reports that not only did 18-to-29-year-olds vote for Obama by far-higher-than-average percentages than folks over 30 years old, they believe that by far-higher-than-average percentages that the government needs to be doing more, not less. This, despite record levels of government spending and debt—and awful results—for the whole of the 21st century.

The paper of record traveled all the way to Montana to rap with a bunch of kids in the college town of Missoula about how fab and gear (is that what the kids say these days?) government really is. The Times needn't have bothered to go all the way to Montana, of course. Because it's the same everywhere:

Under-30 voters are "the only age group in which a majority said the government should do more to fix problems," the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported in November. In a Pew survey a year earlier, more than 8 in 10 said they believed that Social Security and Medicare had been good for the country, and they were especially supportive of seeing the programs overhauled so they would be intact when they retire.

"This is not a generation of socialists," one young leader tells the Times, but they are far more favorable toward big government, it seems, than previous youth cohorts or most of today's population. Kristen Soltis Andersen, an analyst at the Winston Group tells the Times:

"When you ask young voters what caused the recession, this whole idea that there wasn't enough regulation, or it was George W. Bush's fault, is present," she said. "When conservatives make the argument, 'Hey, the government needs to get out of the way and let you make decisions for yourself,' a lot of young people don't have this idea of the government as a boogeyman. So it makes the conservative message less resonant."

courtesy AHIP/Buzzfeed

I'd argue that what makes "the conservative message" resonate less among younger people is its, well, conservatism on things such as war, alternative lifestlyes, drug legalization, and immigration. Younger people are less hung up on the sorts of things that really twist conservatives' knickers. And young people then assume that many of the other things that conservatives espouse—such as generally free markets and open trade—are similarly warped. That conservatives are so inconsistent with their basic message—We want smaller government…except when we're talking about immigrants, the gays, and the ability to kill people overseas!—doesn't help matters, either. Most people surely don't prize consistency as much as libertarians do, but the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy are off-putting to anyone with the smallest taste for consistency.

Over at Buzzfeed, Ben Smith notes one of the most obvious ways that Obama is tossing young people overboard. Come January 2014, their insurance premiums are going to go up. That's because part of health-care reform stipulates tighter limits on the spread of premiums between older and younger people. Current law holds that insurers on average can't charge insurance premiums for old people that are more than five times what they charge younger people. Under Obamacare, that allowable limit is being squeezed to 3-to-1, the result being that older folks will see dramatic drops in costs and younger people will experience major hikes.

courtesy Pew Research

That's just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to the big old-age entitlement plans and their effects on today's youngsters, there are two points to keep in mind. First off, Social Security and Medicare are massive in cost and they go to all seniors, regardless of demonstrated need. This, despite the fact that they are regularly defended as programs that are the only thing standing between old people and poverty. Yet as a group, households headed by someone over 65 years old are doing far better than households headed by someone under 35 years old.

Second, despite the rhetoric that surrounds Medicare and Social Security, these are not self-funding programs similar to retirement and insurance accounts; individuals don't own them and they can't borrow against them or will them to heirs. Instead, old-age entitlements represent a major transfer from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. The payroll taxes that go into Medicare cover only about one-third of the costs; co-pays and some supplemental premiums bring that total up to around 50 percent of the program's costs. The rest comes out of general tax funds.

courtesy Mercatus Center

Theoretically, payroll taxes collected over the years are supposed to cover all costs related to Social Security, but in an age where the ratio of workers paying in to beneficiaries taking out is shrinking, those days are numbered (in fact, Social Security no longer can cover current benefits out of current taxes but is drawing down its trust funds). As important, the official government position—upheld by the Supreme Court—is that no citizen has a right to any Social Security benefits. So it's not a pension plan or even a forced savings plan. It's simply a way that the federal government gets money out of workers to give to retirees—even those who don't need it to make ends meet.

Here's another tough chew: Since 2010, the overwhelming majority of people retiring on Social Security will get less money in benefits than they paid in as payroll taxes (this calculation by Urban Institute analysts assumes 2 percent real returns on payroll taxes and 2 percent real increases in benefit values). In other words, the government is forcing most of us to pay into a system that skims 16.4 percent of every dollar of wages up to about $110,000 and will pay us a negative return.

That's the optimistic version, by the way, since there is virtually no scenario under which future benefits will not be cut even as taxes will have to go up to cover those reduced payouts. When various Social Security and Medicare trust funds run dry—and all but the most hard-headed fiscal denialists grant that will happen sometime by 2030 or sooner—they must cut benefits by law. All of that will have an outsized negative effect especially on people just now entering the workforce. They will be paying higher taxes—money they might have used to start saving for their own retirement—for programs that either won't exist at all or will be seriously diminished by the time they start clipping Depends coupons. (For more on this read "Generational Warfare," in the August/September 2012 issue of Reason.)

courtesy AEI

But this sort of thing is relatively easy to fix compared to the real long-term damage that Obama's reckless spending-and-debt binge will almost certainly cause. In a paper released last year, economists Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, and Kenneth Rogoff documented that periods of "debt overhang" – when accumulated gross debt exceeds 90 percent of a country's total economic activity for five or more consecutive years—reduce annual economic growth by more than 1 percentage point for decades. Surveying over two dozen debt overhang episodes, Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff, found that the typical episode of sharply reduced growth lasted 23 years. In other words, kids: You're screwed.

The U.S. economy has been in a debt overhang since the 2008 financial crisis and there's no reason to believe that President Obama is going to do anything soon to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio. It's fair to say that it's not all his fault. As I never tire of saying, George W. Bush was a big-government disaster, but that can only take you so far. Obama owns the debt every bit as much as he owns the White House for the next four years. And, as the experiences of countries such as Canada and Sweden in recent memory and the United States after World War II attest, there are clear and proven ways to reduce debt-to-GDP and help goose the economy. But because that involves actually changing the status quo and cutting year-over-year spending, Obama is not interested. Indeed, he's even bellyaching about the sequester—which was his idea, by the way. And younger Americans are willing to give him a pass, despite absolutely dismal results under his leadership so far. Does unemployment among 18-to-29 year-olds have to go up to 15 percent (it's already hit 13 percent!) before they get pissed?

The question young people should be asking Obama now is not how much more he might extend their student loan repayments but this: What are you going to do, Mr. President, so that we are not resigned to living in the phantom zone between strong economic growth and sluggish, debt-weakened economic growth?

If you're under 30, look at the chart above and ask yourself whether you'll be lucky enough not to be trapped in that wedge between the blue and red lines? And if you're a parent or grandparent, ask yourself whether your Medicare and Social Security and all the rest is worth consigning your kids to a future of dreams deferred to pay for your benefits. How many of us would prefer to live in a world that's 25 percent poorer than we are right now? Because that's where Obama is leading us.

There's no reason to question The New York Times' finding that folks between 18 and 29 years old are far more likely to believe that government "should do more to solve problems." But until that same group starts recognizing how many problems government is causing—especially for younger people—their future will be far bleaker than they seem to understand.

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I actually had a conversation earlier today with my mother about how I am considering concealing the fact that I have a professional license, or even an advanced degree, so that I am not overqualified for jobs that will pay me more than the job that I spent the money getting the professional license to do.

And you’ll be paying for it via higher taxes, and less benefits when you retire, that is if the dollar doesn’t become worthless and the government collapses since no one will work for worthless currency. If that happens, there is sure to be change, and often it’s not good change.

I hate to be an old man. But there is a lot of truth to number one. The young people I interact with seem incapable of understanding a rational argument. It is not that they are liberal. Young people usually are. It is that they seem to put so little thought into their beliefs. They know the talking points and that is it. They have been trained to give specific answers that people want to hear.

You know I had to eat with my parents. And we talked about current events a lot. And my father was brutal. He didn’t care that I was 12 or even 10. If I said something stupid or wrong, he would tell me about it. There was no “oh isn’t it neat our little snowflake is interested in politics”. Somehow he was never too concerned about my self esteem.

Or even talk to them other than to find out what new toy to appease them with. We don’t eat dinner at the table, but I do talk with my kids every day. Especially when I hear them spouting some bullshit they picked up at school. Sometimes it’s like trying to pull a tick that got stuck in the fat folds of an 800 lb old man.

I told my son he has to learn something new every day. I start bugging him about it when I get home from work and keep on him until he can tell me something. If he can’t come up with anything I tell him he better come up with something soon or stuff is gonna start disappearing from his room.

We didn’t sit at the table, but dad was pretty engaged when he wasn’t off on a job site for months at a time (constructed nuclear reactors and oil rigs as a high pressure steam fitter). He would take me hiking for entire weekends and teach me what he learned as an Army Ranger. Though for a hard as nails guy you would never want to tangle with he had a soft heart and didn’t treat us either as idiots or brow beat us to get off on pushing us around.

Stewart will go through phases where he is more even handed in his selection and treatment of guests. I like him better than Colbert. The first few months Colbert did his schtick it was funny and clever as he was seriously trying to fool people into thinking he was conservative. Now it’s just retarded, progressive nonsense. Is that redundant?

And if you read the article and comments, you pretty quickly catch up to the fact that the major complaint is that how badly they’ve botched lower-order skills, let alone critical thinking or rational analysis, is being measured.

Not so sure that rational analysis or critical thinking was much ever on the public school curriculum. Every now and then, if you were lucky, you might run across someone teaching such skills by accident. But, it’s always been a matter of chance and purely coincidental.

But all you do is repeat bullshit you heard on a.m. radio. Your prepackaged political beliefs are evidence in and of themselves that you are in no position to scold young people for lacking critical thinking.

First, it’s not inherently virtuous to have opinions that nobody else just for the sake of the difference. The problem is that everything you believe is wrong. And that’s not a bizarre coincidence, it’s that you believe things specifically because your political opponents believe the opposite. But your political opponents believe in facts and evidence, so you end up believing in a whole lot of bullshit.

The day that conservatives (and libertarians especially) discovered that Logic 101 text gathering dust in their closet was a bad day. That was when they started believing they could just hurl random bits of vocabulary from it and not have to actually say anything.

Now you know why so many Italians are named Tony. When they were walking around in a daze on the docks of Italy in the early 1900’s, immigration officials would stamp TONY on their foreheads. In other words, To New York!

And by implication you know this because you know everything that is right. Good thing you don’t have any delusions of grandeur.

And that’s not a bizarre coincidence, it’s that you believe things specifically because your political opponents believe the opposite.

Yes Tony, if you can’t make a rational argument much less win an argument just question the other person’s integrity and act like that says anything about the validity of their positions.

But your political opponents believe in facts and evidence, so you end up believing in a whole lot of bullshit.

And then pretend that bald assertions and invective count as argument.

Thank you Tony for giving an perfect example of what I was talking about. The worst part is not that you are so uninformed. The worst part is that you are so uninformed and so irrational that you have no idea how bad off you actually are. You really are living in the depths of Plato’s cave.

And that’s not a bizarre coincidence, it’s that you believe things specifically because your political opponents believe the opposite. But your political opponents believe in facts and evidence, so you end up believing in a whole lot of bullshit.

Young people regurgitate the leftist bullshit they get taught in high school and college. That’s all that is going on. They get the socialist message rammed down their throats. Eventually a few of them wake up and become libertarians.

That’s not how it works in my experience. People go through a libertarian phase sometime in middle or high school. Most grow out of it, especially the ones who go on to higher education (unless they major in computer science or engineering, taking a pass on all the courses that teach critical thinking). Some don’t ever grow out of their adolescent flirtation with libertarianism (the perfect philosophy for an adolescent, after all, as it rewards total self-absorption) and grow up to attach tea bags to their tri-corner hats.

Engineering and CS are some of the ONLY classes where critical thinking is required — not just writing what the prof wants to read. In these fields, things work, or they don’t work. Think about them wrong, and they don’t work.

“the perfect philosophy for an adolescent, after all, as it rewards total self-absorption”

See, I never understand this claim about libertarianism. It seems to me that completely the opposite is true. When all the dangers in the world are supposedly taken care of by a benevolent government, that is when you can be completely self absorbed. Taking responsibility for your own self requires you to be engaged in the world and with other people in a much more significant way (or to go live in a cabin in the woods and be self-sufficient, but there aren’t a lot of that kind of libertarian around here).

For the record, everyone who goes to engineering school take liberal arts electives as a requirement. You have to have at leats two courses that qualify as writing focused, otherwise you get to pick. I took history of science, philosophy, and psychology.

I don’t see any requirement in the liberal arts curriculum to take physics or calculus though.

” everyone who goes to engineering school take liberal arts electives as a requirement.”

And generally most Engineers consider their liberal arts classes as Easy A’s. Certainly, the home work is non-existent and the tests are a joke compared to Differential Equations, Electrical Circuits 2, Assembly Language, etc.

Talk about doubling down on making sure nobody doubts you are not just stupid, but really fucking stupid, Tony. As someone with an AE & EE BS degree, a masters in EE, and 2 decades of software writing & architecting experience, I must unequivocally state that the most illogical and stupid people that I ever had to deal with, totally incapable of any kind of reasoning whatsoever outside the leftist talking points they have managed to memorize, had degrees in those socialist indoctrination courses you want so desperately to pretend are what a critical thinking education is all about.

I am sure that you wrongly interpreted as stupidty was their disdain for you and the fact you aren’t even smart enough to understand how stupid you sound and are Tony, but keep on living in that idiot cocoon of yours.

They know the talking points and that is it. They have been trained to give specific answers that people want to hear.

Ding ding ding!!!

Even young conservatives fall in to this pattern. In my experience teaching at UK (I taught ONLY incoming freshmen), students have absolutely no socio-political perspective outside of the handful of talking points concerning any given topic. The only non-traditional one I ever received was a very conservative Christian arguing that gay marriage shouldn’t be legal because it robs the government of tax money by being able to file as married.

“They know the talking points and that is it. They have been trained to give specific answers that people want to hear.” “Even young conservatives fall in to this pattern.”

Absolutely. But at least the young conservatives have had to argue & defend their points. There are way to many on the left that don’t even think they should have to defend their points. In their world view, they are self evidently right and anyone else is a kook, crook or liar.

As our founders learned from examining history, democracies generally fail once the public starts voting itself benefits from the public treasury. I like to characterize this as the people starting to use government to steal from others, rather than government protecting our liberty (including the liberty of being free from those criminal types who want to use government to steal).

So as the young vote to use government to steal, they will eventually learn that government will be stealing from them. Hopefully they’ll learn sooner rather than too late.

John: I agree with everything you say, but I’m actually glad I’m over 65 and on the backside of the mountain. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I had children, but I don’t, so I don’t really have a dog in the fight. That puts me in the enviable position of being able to sit back and take a sort of perverse pleasure in being able to view the inevitable train wreck that is coming unless things change really quickly. Someone once said, “You get the government you deserve”, and I can’t wait to see all the idiots who think Obama is the messiah get their just deserts. My nephew is one of the kids you speak of. Highly intelligent, but just another lemming when it comes to critical or individual thought processes. He voted in his first election last November. He let it slip that he was voting for Obama. When some members of the family asked why, he basically said, “Well, all my classmates said this about Republicans or that about Romney.” Of course, like all kids today, most of his classmates have been brain-washed by liberal teachers or the like. As you said, today’s kids only know the talking points spieled off by people like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, and we all know they are so “fab and gear?”

Thank God most kids grow out of Liberalism by the time they are 30 or so. I remember what it was like to be that young and that dumb. Don’t know as I’d want to go through it again!

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

Everything except the last part. They uncritically accept the worldview passed to them by their teachers, think it’s their duty to follow the marter plan authority tells them is good, and show more interest in reliving the heyday of their parents’ youth than in creating something new of their own.

Such youth won’t be getting any respect from me until they earn it. Eventually they’ll have to work for a living, and there they will learn to at least please customers and the boss, or lose their job.

If the parents didn’t do their job of teaching their kids to grow up, then at least the necessity of earning a living will. But we’ve created not a safety net, but a hammock. So expect many to get on the hammock, develop no marketable skills, and when the government goes broke and ends welfare, I expect many of them will end up on the streets or flipping burgers. If they riot, I expect they will be jailed, or potentially shot by those protecting their property.

At least the free market produces better manners in people (compare servers in the US to those in the USSR where they didn’t want you there, often didn’t have products to sell, and treated you like dirt). Unfortunately, a bunch of youth will get what they unfortunately deserve.

It keeps the middle classes from threatening those who are already rich.

Profit indeed!

The rich will stay rich forever, so long as there are no other sources that might provide large numbers of well-educated and hard-working people who might upset the system.

Sure, society as a whole will be impoverished, but the rich liberals who run things will be at the top of the heap, continuing to exploit not only those savages in third world places like India and China but also our new young savages in the United States!

Wait, did I say India and China? it’s almost like there’s something I’m forgetting….

The rich don’t say rich forever, and many go broke. Consider the wife of the founder of Jack in the Box, Maureen O’Connor, who was also mayor of San Diego from 1986-1992. She went broke gambling away the money her husband left her, and even stole money from a charity to do it.

What is true, is that the more power government has to pick winners and losers, the more power the rich will have relative to the rest of us.

The solution is to get government out of the winner picking business, and limit government to only dealing with criminals, foreign enemies, and situations in which someone has harmed someone else or their property (i.e. where force has already been initiated against someone). Otherwise, government force just increases the use of force against people in the world.

I tell this to people all the time. The only way to save Social Security and Medicare is to start importing young, healthy workers. And not just tech workers, but anyone that can dig a ditch, build a house, or manufacture a washing machine.

Right, because, as we’ve seen for the last 30 years, we need to increase government spending on health care, education, welfare, and 1000’s of other programs that increase with waves of low-skilled immigrants. We need more government spending to fix the economy.

Of all the things that I a pissed about regarding Obama, I truly hate the muther fucker for what he is doing to my children and grandchildren.

It’s not just Obama. It’s the entire system that has evolved over the decades. It will take a lot more to fix it than getting rid of one person, only to be replaced by someone that won’t be that much different. Government policy is much better at screwing things up than at fixing things simply by virtue of the type of people who make that policy.

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression?everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way?everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want?which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear?which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor?anywhere in the world.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jan. 6, 1941

The internment was for their own protection. If Japan had invaded the west coast the Army would have been riddling every Japanese-looking person with bullets, for obvious reasons. While it seems silly to us 70 years later to think that the Japanese navy could have reached california, it didn’t seem silly in 1942.

That being said, it wasn’t likely to ever happen anyway. Emperor Hirohito had great respect for the wisdom of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,and Yamamoto said, (“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”) Now there would be 3 rifles behind every blade of grass, and with 30 round magazines! LMAO!

The problem is macroeconomics requires mathematics at a little higher level than 5th grade.

Which is not to suggest the corporate-funded think tanks and their legions of bleating sheep peddling deficit obsessiveness are even using basic arithmetic–which does in fact incorporate addition as well as subtraction.

The problem is macroeconomics requires mathematics at a little higher level than 5th grade

No, the problem is that progressives think money comes from elves and unicorns.

Which is not to suggest the corporate-funded think tanks and their legions of bleating sheep peddling deficit obsessiveness are even using basic arithmetic–which does in fact incorporate addition as well as subtraction

Right, because neither the highest spending-to-GDP rate in the post-WW2 era, nor the fact that all GDP growth since 2000 has been financed with deficit spending and not capital accumulation, is anything to be concerned about.

Another fun fact about arithmetic: in division you have both a numerator and a denominator. In the country’s second deepest recession, of course spending over GDP will go up significantly. In fact in the biggest recession since WWII you might expect it to be the period with the highest spending/GDP ratio!

So of course there’s growing the economy to fix these problems, and then there’s using the crisis as an excuse to cut government programs you’ve never liked anyway.

Another fun fact about arithmetic: in division you have both a numerator and a denominator. In the country’s second deepest recession, of course spending over GDP will go up significantly. In fact in the biggest recession since WWII you might expect it to be the period with the highest spending/GDP ratio!

Another fun fact about arithemtic–there’s these things called “functions” where certain people believe that something can grow forever exponentially, and never bother doing the spreads between growth and debt.

So of course there’s growing the economy to fix these problems, and then there’s using the crisis as an excuse to cut government programs you’ve never liked anyway.

Gee, wasn’t the stimulus supposed to do this? Considering we’re spending 8-12% of GDP over the last four years in deficits to get a 1-2% growth rate, you think this is a successful rate of return?

Shit, at least when Reagan was deficit spending to the moon he could claim that overall GDP growth was higher than the deficits he was racking up.

Thank you for finally admitting it. For a year,I’ve been telling people that Liberals are so stupid, that the only reason they think the stimulus failed was because it wasn’t big enough! How does Paul Krugman’s jizz taste Tony!

No Keynesian thinks the stimulus was big enough to return the country to sufficient growth to promote full employment.

Right, because a country that pays out $700 billion in Social Security, $800 billion in payments to the medical industry, a trillion in defense, and $571 billion in unemployment payments, out of a budget of $3.5 trillion, is caught in a liquidity trap.

Right Red Rocks! That’s why Obama pissed away the first stimulus by making sure that the blue states were bailed out of their financial problems and that all the public sector union workers got to keep their jobs. Now he wants another stimulus for what? Oh, I remember! Hire more public sector workers! Workers who produce nothing but added debt for the taxpayers who pay their salaries! That should get the economy restarted right? NOT!

“Another fun fact about arithmetic: in division you have both a numerator and a denominator. In the country’s second deepest recession, of course spending over GDP will go up significantly. In fact in the biggest recession since WWII you might expect it to be the period with the highest spending/GDP ratio!

So of course there’s growing the economy to fix these problems, and then there’s using the crisis as an excuse to cut government programs you’ve never liked anyway.”

None of this applies, however, when the President’s names are Bush or Reagan.

While statists like FDR and Obama want to sell you freedom from want provided by government, I guarantee they will step all over the other freedoms in a sure to fail attempt to remove your want.

To start, they will first take away your freedom to keep the fruits of your labor, so they can pay for it. They will also step on your freedom of religion (e.g. Obamacare forcing Catholics to pay for abortions and contraception). They already are stepping on freedom of speech: they recently confiscated walnuts from a company that said walnuts had health benefits, and the FDA claimed they were illegal drugs.

Thus, the claims of support for freedom are just lies in pursuit of power and wealth.

I accept it. I don’t believe in human perfection so I think sitting in the cheap seats looking down my nose at real players is cowardly and pointless, as I think you do too.

But if that means you want to take ownership of the Bush administration’s several major crimes against humanity, be my guest. I’m comfortable being on a team that will probably never even be capable of reaching that level of evil.

I accept it. I don’t believe in human perfection so I think sitting in the cheap seats looking down my nose at real players is cowardly and pointless, as I think you do too.

Yeah Tony that is why you were so forgiving of Bush. Do you even listen to yourself? And Bush didn’t commit any crimes against humanity. Do you really tell yourself lies like that? Yes you do.

And nothing Bush did even approaches the level of ordering the murder of an American teenager solely because he happened to be the son of someone who was embarrassing to the Administration.

That is what Obama did. He did something no President in history has ever done. He crossed a Rubicon that no one ever thought would be crossed.

You own that dipshit. You defend him for it. You think it is okay or at least not so bad as to be something to worry about it. No amount of screaming about Iraq (a war that many Democrats voted for and Obama continued) changes that fact.

Wow. It is utterly fascinating that you can maintain normal brain functioning with this much cognitive dissonance. Have Obama’s policies resulted in civilian deaths? Yes. So did Bush’s, only orders of magnitude more. You’re making a moral distinction because Congress authorized his war based on lies? As if all those tens of thousands of deaths–which happened for no purpose–are forgiven because of a piece of paper or an arbitrary difference in doctrine? And casting blame on Obama for not ending Bush’s war the day he took office is just obviously disingenuous.

And how soon you forget the official Bush policy of torturing suspects, which is not only clearly a war crime we’ve prosecuted others for, but doesn’t even work. Evil and stupid.

Bush (and his people) lied to start a war. To me that means he might as well have murdered those 4,000 soldiers himself. That’s more Americans dead than Osama bin Laden could manage.

The Bush administration was radicalizing for many of us, and made right-thinking people accept that almost anyone would be better as long as he were not surrounded by the same war criminals who took this country’s credibility and took a giant shit on it for all time, as most people in this country and nearly everyone else in the world understands–just not those of you tuned to a.m. radio.

Yeah Tony, sending troops to a war is just like deciding to assassinate someone.

Just embrace it Tony. It is just a matter of time before Obama kills again and the next time it is likely to be on US soil. John Brennan said as much during his confirmation hearings. You might as well get ready to defend it.

I’ve never defended Obama’s targeted assassination policy. I believe in due process, even for terrorism suspects. I believed in it during Bush and I still do. What did you believe about how we should treat terrorism suspects during the Bush administration?

But this is an imperfect world as as long as someone is in charge who is competent and not surrounded draft-dodging ideologues with a war boner who are itching to invade the next Muslim country, I’ll take it. We only get, broadly, two choices. And your side fucked up so completely that it’s a pretty clear choice.

And yes I believe sending troops to die in a pointless war is the moral equivalent of assassinating them. Why isn’t it? Because war is somehow noble? Even one waged entirely on mendacity?

The left-liberals who stand by this war criminal and Wall Street shill have made their choice: better to have the militarism and police state, so long as it means a little more influence over domestic politics, even if that too is compromised by corporate interference, than it is to embrace a radical antiwar agenda that might complicate their domestic aspirations.

Don’t you start lecturing on moral purism in the voting booth. President Jill Stein would still have to make morally ambiguous decisions. I’m not arguing that there is a perfect choice, I’m arguing there is a better and a worse one. And you are on the side of the worse.

I find Obama supporters and Bush supporters calling the other guy worse, thus, defending their guy, to be entirely missing the point.

The point is politicians in both parties abuse the power of office, because we’ve voted to let our government get out of control. Government is a tool like fire, it can be very useful if you keep it limited to the fireplace, but if you let it out it will burn your house down.

And I find both Obama supporters and Bush supporters letting the fire out of the fireplace, when they should be concentrating on keeping it in the fireplace.

Because “freedom from want” — government stealing some people’s shit to pay for the alleged needs of other people — is such a libertarian value. “Freedom from aggression” — government forcibly disarming people — likewise.

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” ? Thomas Sowell

He does know so much about so much. The problem is that most of what he knows is just plain wrong.

For example he believes that wealth and money are the same thing. That if you steal wealth from the rich you can use it to feed starving children. Except that children don’t eat wealth. They eat food. But he knows that you can feed children with a rich person’s wealth. He KNOWS it! Because it just isn’t fair that the greedy superrich have so much! It’s not fair! So children must eat wealth instead of food! It must be true! His emotions say so!

You seem to understand that the useful innovation called currency can be used to turn a rich person’s luxury item into food for a starving child with little hassle, so I’m not sure what you’re going on about.

If you want to help starving children, you should be advocating for 3rd world countries to become more capitalist. If that occurred, virtually all starving children would stop starving since famines never happen in capitalist countries.

I’d also like to point this out: Your argument that property rights are something that helps the rich is an utter lie. There’s a reason why property rights were first advocated by a newly formed middle class. Property rights help the poor and middle class by stopping the rich from buying armies and taking their shit.

Property rights help the poor and middle class by stopping the rich from buying armies and taking their shit

Exactly. Violating property rights to secure immediate needs is short term thinking. Property rights benefit everyone in the long run by incentivizing production and reducing risk. In a world with no property rights, you have more starving children, not less.

Okay so you’re throwing property rights at me as if it isn’t explicitly a government institution enforced by what could reasonably be called big government. I believe in property rights. Property rights benefit the wealthy only when they exist and all other rights don’t, which is libertarianism.

I just see no moral justification for using government force to protect the luxuries of the rich but not to provide for the basic needs of the poor.

The only contradiction, indeed paradox, is saying taxation is the theft of property, but we have to do it to protect property. The only way to get rid of the paradox is to say that taxation is the way people pay for things they buy collectively, and always has been, and, at least in a democratic society, is not the same thing as theft in any way.

Then how is taking money from one person and flat out giving it to another ‘something we buy collectively.’

To this his usual response is to accuse you of not wanting policemen. He sees absolutely no distinction between taxation to fund government services, and taxation for the sole purpose of wealth redistribution.

The reason that there is taxation is because once you have the last word in violence, no one will stop you from stealing. If someone does you can beat them or even kill them. No one will stop you. Since there will always be a group of men with the last word in violence (government), everyone else (society) will have to put up with their theft.

Taxation is not how people buy things collectively. It’s how the men with the last word in violence pay for things.

There is no such thing as collective action on the scale of a state. The whole idea is bullshit.

I accept that some degree of government is inevitable and probably even desirable. But you still have to deal with the moral implications of what is necessary to have a government. Taxation is one of those things. It requires taking people’s resources; by force if necessary.

In America we’ve already met the basic needs of the poor, and we did it thanks to capitalism. Ever watch Hoarders, Tony? Our white trash hill jacks have enough money to pile rooms floor to ceiling with stiletto shoes and buy 7 refrigerators to fill with dead cats.

The places that have the worst outcomes for people are places that have high levels of government intervention. This includes American inner cities, where the government can’t keep their hands out of the business of people who live there, and as a result they have the worst outcomes of anywhere in this country.

“Property rights help the poor and middle class by stopping the rich from buying armies and taking their shit.”

Yep. And the same thing applies to the idiotic arguments you get periodically that the police, etc. are just there to protect rich people’s property, so using taxes to pay for them is just the same a redistribution through welfare or whatever. Completely the opposite is true. The rich people can afford to protect their own stuff. It is the poor and middle class who benefit.

The rich people can afford to protect their own stuff. It is the poor and middle class who benefit.

Except that they really don’t. Have you ever been robbed or burglarized? I have. The cops took the opportunity to run me for warrants, search me for drugs, question me about drugs, then they left. I knew who did it, but they weren’t hearing it. They wanted to bust me for something, anything, and when I failed to give them a reason, they left.

Because of the war on drug users, I believe the poor and middle class have more to fear from the police than from actual criminals. Cops care more about busting people with contraband and stealing their shit than about crimes with actual victims. Get rid of drug laws and cops might actually serve a useful purpose.

Agreed. I have been fortunate enough to have had almost no interaction with police in my life. But it is probably true that in many situations, anyway, poor people have more to lose than to gain from the police. If only things that actually hurt other people were criminal, we could probably have about half the number of cops doing twice the good they do now. I guess in my original post I was thinking more of how things ought to work than the reality now.

I have been fortunate enough to have had almost no interaction with police in my life.

There was a drug related incident in high school where apparently a report was filed, but there were no charges. However that must have come up when they would run my name. That’s my guess anyway, because cops would be reasonably professional until they ran my name, and from that moment on they were just trying to find an excuse. There was one who would just follow me around. Didn’t even attempt to hide it. If he saw me he’d follow me until I went indoors, and half the time he’d be waiting for me. Finally they succeeded in running me out of town, and since then the few times I’ve dealt with cops they actually treated me like a citizen, as opposed to an enemy combatant in the war on drug users.

“Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942.

Which only reinforces the point that everyone, without exception, will spend an unlimited amount of other people’s money to stay alive.

So what’s the problem? A) The unwillingness of other people to spend an unlimited amount of money to keep others alive or B) the open ended commitment by people like you to FORCE other people spend an unlimited amount of money to keep others alive.

Is your premise that there isn’t a problem with letting people die for lack of resources to get medical care?

There’s a lot more we could do to save people money on healthcare without having to resort to unthinkable wealth-based social darwinism, but once we implement the known strategies for cost-saving, you are free to advocate for death panels.

Y’know, I’m still waiting for somebody to explain why health care is somehow different from every other good and service in the universe that it can’t be made cheaper and allocated more efficiently by market mechanisms.

Y’know, I’m still waiting for somebody to explain why health care is somehow different from every other good and service in the universe that it can’t be made cheaper and allocated more efficiently by market mechanisms.

I guess I’ll keep waiting.

That’s not the point. The point is that health care is a basic need. Because it is a basic need, no one should profit from it. That isn’t fair. Profit is waste that goes to rich people. Because government doesn’t waste money on profits, the solution is to put government in charge of all health care. That way no one will profit.

Cheap and efficient is not the goal. The goal is to prevent people from profiting off health care. Even if that profit motive results in cheaper and more efficient delivery of health care related goods and services, it must be eliminated.

That way no one will feel bad about someone making a profit off of their health care.

it’s a product nobody wants to buy but that everyone has to buy at some point

Really? No one wants to have a baby? Or get birth control pills? Or get vaccinated against dangerous diseases? Or just get a check up to see if there is anything wrong?

There is lots of medical care that is not emergent and which people do want to buy. And almost everyone could plan and save for such things. You are just plain wrong. And the emergency stuff that no one wants or plans for could easily have been covered by a catastrophic insurance plan, which used to cost about $100 a month before the new requirements started to kick in.

EVERYONE dies for lack of resources to get medical care. Some cures havn’t been invented yet.

The known strategies for cost-saving are an illusion that will do little more than slow the inflation rate. People just want to convince themselves that the impossible is possible. They don’t want to acknowledge the reality that resources are ultimately finite and it’s not humanly possible to give everyone all the medical treatment they could possibly benefit from.

Hey, Tony. Did you know that poor Hispanic immigrants are the least likely group to have health insurance in this country? Did you also know that they have higher life expectancy in this country than even white Americans? Meanwhile, the lowest life expectancy of any group in America is Native Americans, who have free health insurance.

Given this: How can you argue that a lack of health insurance kills people?

first thing we could do to save people money is to get govt the hell out of the health care business. But folks like you cannot wrap your heads around govt being the wellspring of cost inflation that it is.

The marketplace is, by all evidence, the source of artificial cost inflation, not the government, which in every other industrialized country has managed to keep costs down relative to us even with government-run systems.

Healthcare just isn’t a normal product in the market, so it doesn’t follow the same rules as a box of cereal. It’s a product nobody wants to buy but everyone will have to buy at some point.

And they keep prices down by rationing care. The reason health care costs in America are high is because Americans get far more tests done than people in other countries. The only way to drive down costs is to not let them buy such things. Also known as rationing care.

Even Krugman said that the only way to pay for this stuff is through ‘death panels and sales taxes.’ Sales taxes are highly regressive, meaning poor people are going to be slammed by the higher cost of goods. Just like in Europe, where virtually all consumer goods are vastly more expensive than they are here.

In other words: Food prices would drop if we didn’t let people buy food. The price of something being low isn’t necessarily a good thing when A) The quality drops accordingly or B) People can’t buy the thing they want.

See, Tony, the problem is that positive and negative rights are completely different things. We are using the word “rights” to mean different, and often contradictory things.

I could say “I think that elephants should be considered marsupials”. And that may well be true if I have a completely different definition of marsupial than you do. But you know the difference between positive and negative rights and you know that when we say “rights” we mean negative rights.

It is funny how the sock puppets show up on certain threads. They never show up on the straight drone murder threads. But they always show up on the “my God is this generation retard” threads. They do seem to have a method to it. I really think Tony, Shreek, Orin and the others are all just franchises of the same group of Mobies.

Now be fair John….Shreeky isn’t here because he’s out battling in the world of HIGH FINANCE….T o n y is because there is a “free” computer in the teachers lounge at Upper Midwit Community College. Orin…well I kinda like your death by copraphagy supposition.

There are alot of stupid people of all ages, but the typical republican platform is so socially intolerant and hawkish, an antithesis of the youngest generation, how can you expect them to support most republicans (aside from Ron Paul’s hordes)? At best they should abstain entirely or vote libertarian, but its easy to see the siren song of Obama luring them astray. But is the whole plan to blame a generation for misguidance??? Reagan didn’t win by calling the youth morons, he won by showing a new optimistic path to republicanism. Maybe instead of tossing out vinettes of youth stupidity, try considering what will convince them to find a better path. Goddamn reason grumpy old farts.

2. After four years of Obama continuing and increasing every single one of Obama’s policies, you have to really be retarded to view Republicans as any more or less hawkish than Democrats. If anything, you should want a Republican President on the theory that a Republican, unlike a Democrat, will actually be challenged on war and civil liberties.

If Obama has taught the world one thing, it is that a Democratic President can get do pretty much anything they want when it comes to war and civil liberties.

Open borders has nothing to do with social tolerance from a libertarian perspective. It is simple freedom of movement, freedom of contract and freedom to dispose of one’s own property as one sees fit. Basic fundamental rights of the individual.

Did anyone actually believe that he wasn’t pro-marriage equality from the get-go? He was on record in the ’90s in favor of it. His evolution was just political theater. It was infuriating how many of my straight friends fawned over him after he “evolved” after making sure it was absolutely safe to do so.

While I’m not prone to agreement with Tulpa or John, they both raise interesting points here. The issue to me doesn’t seem that the Dems are any more tolerant, it’s just they’re “tolerance” is of certain proclivities that the young seem to think important (largely because their parents and grandparents considered them taboo). Sure, the Left is broadly the side that agitates for gay marriage and drug reform. But the left is also actively agitating against free choice in food, tobacco, firearms, “hate” speech, etc.

It’s not simply a matter of tolerance, it’s more like a matter of tolerating certain deified beliefs and condemning others. And I don’t think that my generation is necessarily prone towards the same deified beliefs, they’ve just been spoon-fed a certain narrative of what is tolerant for their entire lives.

[…] The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.

The only way you can be free from want is by being dead. Unmet wants is what drives the economy and the price system, what in economics is called “Demand.” There’s NO way around it – people will WANT something, sometime, somewhere. Since there’s no genie to conjure up goods and services at the snap of the fingers, what FDR was saying was totally fallacious and stupid. The musings of an ignorant oaf.

FDR was a big economics-ignoramus, so I am not surprised another big economics-ignoramus – YOU – would even dare quote him.

The fourth is freedom from fear […]

And so FDR was going to ban horror movies, I guess…

Fear is an emotion produced by certain types of information bombarding the brain, coupled with millions of years of ognanic evolution. Saying that we can live free of fear is the epitome of arrogance and stupidity.

Again, I am not surprised you would quote that uncritically. You are demonstrably the epitome of… well, you know.

Agree OldMex, but FDR wasn’t totally economically stupid. He was smart enough to realize that public sector unionism would be a cluster fuck, and that it should never be allowed to occur! Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while!

No you just want to enjoy the fruits of modern civilization without having to pay anything for it.

Government did not create or invented civilization, nor is it the driver of it. The methods followed by all governments, anywhere, regardless of how government types fancy themselves – either good or perfect – run contra civilization. Governments take by force; governments kill and governments cheat. You can try to rationalize them but, in the end, you cannot obfuscate these facts.

Civilization came to being thanks to the Division of Labor, achieved after the discovery of agriculture and the obtaining of food surpluses. With that, man was finally able to specialize and become more productive in other endeavors without fear of starvation, instead of living every day on the verge of potential starvation as a hunter-gatherer, subject to the vicissitudes of living directly from nature, leaving little time to produce other things. Government had NOTHING to do with any of this, so the suggestion that it is through taxation that people keep civilization alive is not only an egregious lie, it is also a disgusting, crass and incredibly stupid suggestion.

I don’t want to shock you, but government existed even among hunter-gatherer societies. And they weren’t exactly free forms of it. For almost the entirety of human history in all places, humans have been governed by despots. It’s just one of the quirks of our nature. We’ve managed to invent forms of self-government that have the effect of transferring both power and wealth from the hands of the few who were lucky enough to inherit it from their strongman ancestors to a broader distribution.

You’re right that governments use force, but pretending they didn’t exist in one form or another at every point along the line of human history, for inescapably practical reasons, is to miss the boat entirely. It is almost logically impossible to envision human society without government in some form or another. You want government, you just don’t realize it, and you want a form that is much less free than the one I advocate. You want everyone subject to the tyranny of a system that countenances no large-scale collective effort (i.e., taxing and spending), which would obviously be a nightmarish hellscape nobody would want to live in.

Noting the existence of some form of government or tribal structure does not in any way prove that said govt fostered, developed, or led to the creation of the very thing that OM accurately claims as the birth of civilization: domesticated agriculture and the division of labor. .

You’re a bigger fool than you think, Tony. You equivocate so easily it makes me wonder if you’re breathing mold in that basement of yours.

For almost the entirety of human history in all places, humans have been governed by despots.

So what? How is that a case for justifying the notion that government drives civilization? It’s like saying that disease drives health because disease is so ubiquitous!

It is almost logically impossible to envision human society without government in some form or another.

Again, so what? It is impossible to envision human society without disease in some form or another. That does not mean disease is preferable to total health, just like government is not preferable to total freedom.

You want everyone subject to the tyranny of a system that countenances no large-scale collective effort (i.e., taxing and spending), which would obviously be a nightmarish hellscape nobody would want to live in.

You must be jesting. What you’re saying is that, sans the systematic and violent taking of property (taxes) and the waste (spending), people would live in a veritable Golgotha?

The best part (or worst part, depending on your point of view) is Tony’s insinuation that without the big taxing and spending state, we all would be living inside the novel The Road, killing and eating each other. Never mind that those scenes of desperation were and ARE routine in pleces where government is the most oppressive and ubiquitous, like the USSR, China and now North Korea. His world and concepts are totally 180 degrees of reality yet he’s the one saying we’re the crazy ones. I sometimes believe he goes around San Francisco, pushing a shopping cart around, with his trusty laptop and free WiFi.

And they’re universally known in areas with weak governments. It goes without saying that tyrannical governments can lead to misery. But minimal governments inevitably do. Or else perhaps you can name a society in the modern world that has both broad prosperity and a government that does as little as you think it should.

Sure, sure. So there’s a happy medium of tyranny in your mind – as long as they don’t kill you, then they can fuck you.

Or else perhaps you can name a society in the modern world that has both broad prosperity and a government that does as little as you think it should.

The US for her first 120 years. A government so weak it could not stop its people from the debauchery of invention and economic development. People came from Europe just to see the sorry affair! Awful, awful place.

Today we have little invention, no development and a shrinking labor market. Certainly, we’re in bliss.

Holy Shit Mex! Are you saying that Tony is from San Francisco? Because if that is true, it explains his dementia, at least for me. San Francisco! Home of the Pelosites, where you can dine bare-assed in public but can’t buy or sell goldfish.

That conservatives are so inconsistent with their basic message – We want smaller government… except when we’re talking about immigrants, the gays, and the ability to kill people overseas! – doesn’t help matters, either.

Indeed, and the awful thing about this is that those are not even conservative values. Limiting people’s freedoms and killing overseas are staples of statists, socialists or imperialists. The sad fact is that today’s true conservatives have been shushed by those that hijacked the movement and talk in their name. Unfortunately, since these conservatives have been convinced that cheering for empire is evidence of their patriotism and wanting to control people’s choices is demontration of their conservative credentials, the movement is doomed, culturally.

Which is why leftists HATE libertarians, since most of us (not all, alas) libertarians are committed to freedom as a matter of principle and enjoy the most solid of philosophical foundations that help us resist the encroachment from forked-tongued socialists.

The marketplace is, by all evidence, the source of artificial cost inflation,

You have NO idea, NO clue or even a HINT of what is inflation, Tony. The marketplace responds to only two things: Supply, and Demand. Prices are know after the demand schedule is met, and that does not mean only goods or services, but also demand for MONEY. The market clears when the demand for a good or a service, and the demand (in recipricity) of money balance each other – i.e. the market clears.

What creates inflation is the issuance of paper money by the central bank or the overemission of bank notes and credit by banks, beyond the available reserves. This increase in the money supply makes some people feel “richer” – suddenly – increasing the demand for goods or services, thus increasing prices in the maket. So rising prices are the RESULT of inflation, not the reason.

WHY? Because you say? Medical care is a service just like any other, provided by a person that made an investment in time and money to learn marketable skills. You cannot call it “different” only because you apply a moral value on it. Your own delusion is YOUR problem, not everybody else’s.

so it doesn’t follow the same rules as a box of cereal.

YEs, it does. BOTH are subjected to the Law of Scarcity. if you don’t believe me, then kill all the doctors.

I’ve yet to meet anyone in this demographic who isn’t a self absorbed entitlement minded douche nozzle. Hell I’m 34 and I think you extend the self absorbed douche demographic up to at least my age if not older. Truly we are Generation Derp. There’s a reason I play violent video games.

I turned 30 in August. And while it is one of those benchmarks where you feel old, I felt at least fortunate to leave behind my association with that wretched 18-29 demo that absolutely radiates delusion.

You know for all the grief given to commenter Shrike/Palin, if one reads his or her comments there will be some mode of (very) broadly libertarian reasoning (if not that flavor of this commenting group)

Commenter “Tony”, however, seems to come here to repeatedly state that you are all craven, stupid or evil. Or at the most kind, that you are all severely misguided.

He or she must be most selfless as to so relentlessly attempt to illuminate your failings given how throughly he or she is attacked.

My guess is that there’s nothing else for Tony to do except pushing that shopping cart around San Francisco, dumpster-diving for scraps and magazines, and blogging in his trusty Pentium laptop with free WiFi.

While crying copious amounts of tears that they were produced by companies driven by the evil profit motive, when progressive government could have made those things by strategically redistributing wealth and as such “investing” in society.

We’ll call us even because I can’t remotely fathom why people would come to a forum only to intellectually circle jerk one other. It seems quite easy to slip into groupthink in that situation. And my hypothesis is that is the problem of libertarians and so-called conservatives nowadays. They don’t read anything that doesn’t confirm what they want to believe. Say what you will about me but you can’t accuse me of that.

Yeah, I’ve never seen forum under a single ideological banner where people disagree so much as they do here, and I mean that. And usually, the debates are cool and rational as long as everybody’s arguing in good faith (ie, not Tony).

And usually, the debates are cool and rational as long as everybody’s arguing in good faith

They’re at least entertaining, as people here have original thoughts (either correct or wrong). You don’t see endless iterations of the platitudes “Obama is so dreamy!” and “Fuck the rich/Business/conservatives/libertarians”

They don’t read anything that doesn’t confirm what they want to believe. Say what you will about me but you can’t accuse me of that.

A fair enough point, but reading something only with the eye to find its weaknesses and tear them apart isn’t exactly being open minded and considering information in an objective manner. I’d say that’s largely what you try to do here. Moreover, Reason can be an echo chamber at times (as can any forum where the majority of posters agree on a set of topics: see: Huffpo, Kos, NatlReview, etc.) but there is also areas where there are debates that produce something of a valuable dialogue. The reason we come to reason is because we end up discussing issues with people who come from the same general priority background as us (i.e. liberty first), and then debate the issues around that general framework.

Mex: You have to understand that it all boils down to one thing for Democrats/Liberals. They only have one reason to live. Their whole existence is predicated on being able to tell themselves and each other that they are intellectually and morally superior to anyone who does not share their ideology or agenda. That is why they tend to congregate in urban enclaves and pump sunshine up each others assholes.They don’t understand what passes for mainstream America, because they think that they ARE mainstream America. Like the man said, “A fish doesn’t know that its wet!” Liberals think that everything they know or will ever need to know, has already been imparted to them by those sages of Ivy League academia, or maybe Jon Stewart? They are all moist in the crotch now, because the greatest sage of all is going to be speaking directly to them in an hour or so. Unfortunately, we poor Libertarians and Conservatives will never possess the perspicacity or erudition necessary to fathom the wisdom of “The Great One”!

It must be a tremendous burden to be a Liberal, and have to bear the awesome responsibility of being the only ones capable of possessing enough intelligence, culture and grace to take care of the poor misguided ignorant masses?

Well said. The thing is, they’ve built up a system of subventions that are covered over by moral arguments and ofttimes outright moralizing. Interestingly, the subventioneers started off with practical arguments [eg., “we need a minimum wage, else people will sleep in the public parks”] and moved into the morals game later.

If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to earn the coveted ‘stupid’ award, track down where the subventions actually go. And then ask pesky questions based upon those actual results.

No wonder why there’s so much economic doomsaying in libertarian circles. Methinks that most here have a wee suspicion that the unwashed masses which the liberals think all love them will show a different side when the subvention money gets tight.

That said, a sustained stretch of austerity is the time when a polity is most at risk of outright fascism. Fascists promise the same moon the economic statists do, only their muscleheadedness and disdain for economic reality gives them a sincerity that an abashed subventioneer can no longer show. So, there’s a case for hoping that the creaky system of present times keeps creaking along until libertarian ideas have spread more widely and grown deeper roots in the culture.

If young people are libertarians who are turned off small government arguments made by “conservatives”, then why don’t they just vote…. libertarian? Or at least vote to limit the size of government, whether it has Republican support or not?

I’m not even sure young people can even distinguish “conservatism” from “libertarianism”. Advocating for libertarian agenda online is bullseye for “You got that from FOX news” or “you’re a right winger” type of response from college kid. Outside of the die hard Ron Paul crowd (who won’t vote GOP anyways) most kids are reliably left wing and endorses an active government that promotes social agenda. Drug legalization and gay marriage are popular leftist agenda that just happens to coincide with libertarianism.

Conservatives snapped out of the illusion that Latinos and immigrants are “natural constituents” because they go to church and are “hard working”. I don’t know on what basis libertarians keep thinking “if either party was more like us, they would win.” The country will be still broke if gays can marry and you can smoke dope.

Tonight, President Obama is going to have to be a uniter, not a divider. One thing that we can all agree on is that the Congress and the President need to work together. No Labels is committed to support party collaboration and resolve the congressional gridlock. Join us @ http://www.nolabels.org

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